Nothing very serious of alike nature occurred in Utrecht until the end of
the year, when a determined and secret conspiracy was discovered, having
for its object to overpower the garrison and get bodily possession of
Colonel John Ogle, the military commander of the town. At the bottom of
the movement were the indefatigable Dirk Kanter and his friend Heldingen.
The attempt was easily suppressed, and the two were banished from the
town. Kanter died subsequently in North Holland, in the odour of
ultra-orthodoxy. Four of the conspirators--a post-master, two shoemakers,
and a sexton, who had bound themselves by oath to take the lives of two
eminent Arminian preachers, besides other desperate deeds--were condemned
to death, but pardoned on the scaffold. Thus ended the first revolution
at Utrecht.

Its effect did not cease, however, with the tumults which were its
original manifestations. This earliest insurrection in organized shape
against the central authority of the States-General; this violent though
abortive effort to dissolve the Union and to nullify its laws; this
painful necessity for the first time imposed upon the federal government
to take up arms against misguided citizens of the Republic, in order to
save itself from disintegration and national death, were destined to be
followed by far graver convulsions on the self-same spot. Religious
differences and religious hatreds were to mingle their poison with
antagonistic political theories and personal ambitions, and to develop on
a wide scale the danger ever lurking in a constitution whose fundamental
law was unstable, ill defined, and liable to contradictory
interpretations. For the present it need only be noticed that the
States-General, guided by Barneveld, most vigorously suppressed the local
revolt and the incipient secession, while Prince Maurice, the right arm
of the executive, the stadholder of the province, and the representative
of the military power of the Commonwealth, was languid in the exertion of
that power, inclined to listen to the specious arguments of the Utrecht
rebels, and accused at least of tampering with the fell spirit which the
Advocate was resolute to destroy. Yet there was no suspicion of treason,
no taint of rebellion, no accusation of unpatriotic motives uttered
against the Stadholder.

There was a doubt as to the true maxims by which the Confederacy was to
be governed, and at this moment, certainly, the Prince and the Advocate
repre